


and never rose again

by Dorkangel



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abandonment, Choice of the Peredhel, Defiant happy endings, Elements of canon racism rejected, Families of Choice, Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Not Technically Canon-Divergent, People of Haleth - Freeform, Second Kinslaying | Sack of Doriath, Well Some People Die (Sorry Dior), Wilderness Survival, not technically an au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 02:26:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16507598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: There is no plausible way that the bird-boned little twins, both hurt, will be able to defend themselves against the most foul dangers of the woods, orcs or wolves or, most likely of all, starvation. It is early morning now: they must have been put to flight in the night.The human hunter doubts very much that they would survive the next night alone.*In which it is not incorrect, exactly, to say that Eluréd and Elurín were lost in the forest and died there, or to say that most of the people of Haleth left and travelled to the Mouths of Sirion after Húrin's slaying of Brandir. Butmostis notall, and long happy years might be lived between being lost and dying.





	and never rose again

**Author's Note:**

> For context - Eluréd and Elurín are born in the year 500 of the First Age, the Second Kinslaying / Ruin of Doriath is in 506, Eärendil sails West in 538, and the Drowning of Beleriand is 590 of the First Age / 1 of the Second Age, so those are the ages of the twins in the respective parts of the story.

They are tiny, and alone, and helpless, and absolutely heartbreaking to be witness to. Both of them silver-haired, fine-featured, bird-boned-looking young things; one in pale green raiment like fresh young leaves in spring with his hair loose and lank around his shoulders, the other in dirtied white with two braids half-unravelled, but otherwise utterly identical in size and form. As close as mirror images, they stand pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, with their small hands clutched tight together between them. Their big eyes stare fearfully at the forest around them - and with good reason, it seems, since the arm of the green-clothed twin is all too clearly broken, held tenderly against his chest as he sobs with fatigued tears of pain, and the white-clothed one stumbles, dazed, while deep red blood mats the fine hair at his temple and stains the fragile fabric of his collar. They have been attacked, that is clear, driven into the woods not by wild beasts or by confusion but by vicious intent. And now they are alone, and lost, and though the white-clothed one holds with white-knuckled desperation to a fallen tree branch with the hand not clinging to the other, there is no plausible way that he or his injured brother will be able to defend themselves against the most foul dangers of the woods, orcs or wolves or, most likely of all, starvation. It is early morning now: they must have been put to flight in the night. Trewern doubts very much that they would survive the next night alone.

He wants to weep for them in pity. The twins are so young, so profoundly _small_. Trewern has no children of his own, and no way of knowing the speed of an elf’s maturity - for he is a human hunter, not an elven doctor, but they must be elves, the delicate, long ears knifing through their hair made more obvious by their fearful flickering and swivelling, the strangeness and the luminosity in their being that Trewern has always recognised in grown elves so very clear in children - but if they were children of men they could not yet be eight years old.

They have not noticed him, for all their watchful wariness, if only because they are so distressed and he had the woodsman’s instinct to camouflage himself at the first noise of their advance, and now crouches, cautious, in the undergrowth, watching and pitying and wondering how in the name of all the Valar he is to approach them without spooking them into flight.

As he watches, the green-clothed twin treads upon a twig below dry leaves, and the sudden _crack_ makes both jump badly, clinging closer to each other and crying anew. It is too much for them: one sinks down to his knees and the other follows, tired enough to tremble, and the white-clothed elfling relinquishes his hold on the stick to scrub a hand over his eyes, and whispers words too soft for Trewern to catch anything but the name of Elbereth.

He places his weapons silently on the ground and stands, slowly, and at first they still do not see him. When they do, it is the white-clothed boy, who stumbles back, a gasp of horror on his lips and the feeble branch quite forgotten; in doing so, though, he knocks his brother, and the broken arm, and the elfling gives a sharp cry of _ah!_ and doubles over, freezing the other in place, and Trewern understands suddenly that the child will not, cannot, run without his brother, cannot move. As they stare up at him, panicked, he reaches up to push down his hood, to let them see his face and his expression of concern. Who knows if it was human men that attacked them - if it was orcs, they would be dead or carried off, rather than abandoned, and most likely dead, too young to make useful thralls - but it was not Trewern’s people.

“Do not be afraid,” he says, as gently as he can, and inwardly prays with all his might that they will understand the Mannish language. He deliberately speaks in the more common dialect of Taliska, and not his own Haladin tongue. “I will not hurt you.”

They still only stare, too surprised or too frightened or too uncomprehending to respond, so he continues on.

“I… am a woodsman of the people of Haleth,” Trewern tries, seeking for any word that they may recognise. “My father and my uncles fought in the Nirnaeth Arnœdiad-” They will not be old enough to remember the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, he is almost sure, but perhaps they will understand that he means to say that his family has been allied to elves in the not-so-distant past. “-and we still defend Teiglin, what few we are…”

 _They are children_ , he reminds himself, as the green-clothed boy tenses himself and the white-clothed boy’s chest begins to rise and fall rapidly, to the point of hyperventilation, both as though preparing to flee. _They are only children, and they are scared._

Trewern, to looks of confusion and fear, goes low to one knee, so that he is more of a height with them, and does his best not to loom over them any longer.

“I mean you no harm.” he says again, careful. “My name is Trewern.”

There is a long, silent moment between them. If they run, and he pursues, likely he will catch them. They are too small and too hurt to make it far. But he does not wish for that.

The green-clothed elfling squeezes his brother’s hand, for courage.

“I am Eluréd,” he croaks, thankfully in Mannish that Trewern can understand, with the distinctive accent of the house of Bëor. “And this is Elurín.”

Trewern would sag in relief if they were not still so dangerously vulnerable.

“Will you let me help you?” he asks.

 

*

 

His sisters and his cousins and their families look at him with utter astonishment, but they are Haladin, used to the cautious quiet and solitude of the woods, and the signals used therein, and so when Trewern shakes his head and makes the signs for _later_ and _hush_ with his hand they pointedly make space and do not yet (verbally) question the fact that he has returned not with a deer or a brace of rabbits, but with an exhausted elfling held carefully on each hip. Their arms are slung about his neck - one arm, in the case of Eluréd - their heads cushioned to his chest, and he had worried that he might drop them at first, but they are so light that if they were human children he would think they were in famine.

“Do not sleep, little ones,” he had murmured, as Elurín closed his eyes on the way. “It is dangerous, when you have had a blow to the head. Wait just a while yet.”

Now, as Trewern sets them gently down by the campfire, Elurín looks at the other humans with dull curiosity, at the beginnings of the day’s stew with dull hunger. With the adrenaline faded from his system, he is bone-weary, and must want nothing more than sleep. But Trewern, guilty though he feels for it, cannot let him have it. Beside him, Eluréd looks around himself with the same wide damp eyes that he has worn this entire time.

“Your arm pains you?” he asks, choosing to concentrate on the most urgent of their concerns first, and Eluréd nods shyly. By the time Trewern looks over his shoulder to ask his sister for bandages and turmeric root or willow bark to relieve the hurt she is already rummaging through their supply for it. “May Heseld take a look at it? She is a healer.”

Eluréd nods again, this time looking to his brother.

“You too.” Trewern promises Elurín, who looks about ready to cry again, trying to smile reassuringly as his heart twists in sympathy. “Wait a moment.”

When he turns to Heseld she only raises her eyebrows, and he points quickly to each and says their names; there is fascination and perplexion in her face, but it is well below determination to help, so she only jerks her head in acknowledgement before she goes to them, and he can go to stride to her husband, Harthek, on the other side of their small camp. As he does he hears her begin to talk to them in a kind voice.

“Do we have bread? They shouldn’t have to wait for the stew, they have been lost and they haven’t eaten for -”

Harthek takes hold of his upper arm and turns him away from the twins, a look of such constipated shock in his bulging eyes and pinched lips and, _ah, yes,_ Trewern remembers suddenly that most people are not his siblings who remember him bringing home multiple bear cubs and entreating his mother to let him keep them. Compared to that, a pair of elf twins are relatively innocuous.

“What is this?” he hisses, not angrily, but certainly insistent. “Where did you find them?”

“They were abandoned in the forest,” says Trewern back, recalling tales of fantastical elven hearing and keeping his voice very low and level. “And they are hurt, and they are little children alone, I could not just -”

At the assurance that his brother-in-law has not, at least, simply pulled two elf-children from the arms of their parents, Harthek’s expression relaxes slightly into understanding. Trewern takes the opportunity to take off his bow and pass it to Harthek to be put away.

“Where is your axe?”

“I left it.”

“Your _father’s axe?_ ”

“I could find no safe way to carry the axe and the children at the same time, so…”

Harthek curses softly, and they both hesitate as they turn back to look across the fire, where Elurín is finally giving Heseld a watery smile, and Eluréd stays very still as he allows her to feel for the break, and the rest of Trewern’s extended family try not to make their intense curiosity too overbearingly obvious.

“Allfather,” breathes Harthek, brows crumpling together as he goes through the same internal calculations that Trewern had when he had found them. “Why were they there at all? What happened?”

Trewern’s lips twist, both with the shame of not knowing for certain and the sinking feeling of the conclusion he has come to.

“I think that they were attacked,” he says grimly. “Elf against elf - it’s the only scenario that would explain it.”

Perhaps he forgets to be as quiet as he should be, or perhaps the ears of elves are even more sensitive than he has been led to believe, because Eluréd’s twitch and he glances up at them, his drawn expression far too severe for his small age.

“They wanted the jewel.” states the elfling, simply, not particularly loudly, but especially audible in the sudden silence that falls in the wake of his words. It seems that he understands the tongue of the Haladin, then.

“Ada’s jewel,” he specifies, when none of his human hosts seem to understand, his face turning rapidly to anxiety and upset. “They said that it was theirs, and then…”

“Then there was fighting,” continues Elurín, frowning heavily. “And Ada and Nana fell. And they didn’t get up. But one of _them_ fell too.”

“And they were very angry that he was dead,” nods Eluréd, biting his lip. “So… they hurt us, and they took us away.”

“And then it was night and it was cold,” concludes Elurín. “And then you found us.” His face as he looks up at Trewern is so innocent and so hopeful despite what they have described that it physically aches.

Trewern’s youngest sister, Tressa, wraps her arms protectively around her belly and the child within, and looks to Trewern with not only disquiet but a demand that he _say something_ , and he almost wilts under the strength of her gaze.

“You are safe here,” he tells the twins, crossing back over to crouch before them, because what else can he tell them? “We will not let ‘them’ - or anybody - hurt you.”

It is a weak promise, and he knows it, and so do both of the boys, but when Eluréd frowns Heseld presses his good hand to distract him.

“We will not let them find you,” she promises, just a little fierce. Whatever the conflict that has led to their displacement, there is no way that children such as these can deserve the fate that the enemies of their family have tried to inflict on them. “No one knows that we are here.”

 

*

 

That is true in essence, if not in fact. Trewern will explain to them later, when they are old enough to understand, about Húrin and Túrin and the slaying of Brandir, and the ruin of Obel Halad afterwards, and the flight of the most of the surviving Haladin to the Havens of Sirion at the mouth of the sea. Elves and dwarves, he knows, are rarely solitary, and it is to their great detriment and misery when they are - so the concept that some small bands of men might chose to remain behind in the forest of Brethil, apart from their people, is bizarre to them. Instead, the forest is presumed empty by the vast bulk of the peoples of Middle Earth, the Druédain all scattered.

Still, _some_ people know that Trewern and his family linger in Brethil; lone hunters and rangers, for the most part, or cousins married into Hithlum. Nobody who might reveal them to marauding elves.

For the first few days not one of them so much as dreams of asking the boys where they came from, or whom the battle they survived was between. But when they have eaten and Heseld is trying her best to check the severity of Elurín’s inevitable concussion, and tells him apologetically that she does not know very much about elf physiology, it sends them both into a fit of giggling that causes Trewern to choke on his water in alarm.

“We are not elves,” explains Eluréd, through his laughter, as though the thought that they are is ridiculous.

Heseld and Trewern meet eyes, both suddenly stiff. Heseld will later tell him that her thoughts went first to the old rumour that orcs and elves were once of one kindred, and to a cold shock of fear that they might be harbouring not the firstborn Eruhíni, but some sort of orc larvae; it’s an objectively ludicrous theory, but less so than Trewern’s sudden remembrance of ancient myths of faeries and changelings, which he inwardly vows never to mention aloud. Of course, Eluréd means neither of those things.

“What are you, little one, if you are not an elf?” he asks.

“We are peredhel.” states Elurín, with a tone in his voice as though it should be obvious. _Edhil_ , Trewern thinks he recognises, but he cannot figure the meaning of the word as a whole.

Seeing his confusion, they exchange a thoughtful look.

“Nana is an elf,” Elurín goes on, considering, and doesn’t see Trewern wince at the way they speak of their parents as though they were still alive. He had done the same, after the Nirnaeth Arnœdiad, catching himself mid-sentence in his references to his father. “But Ada is not. He is _o nos neledh_.”

Trewern smiles ruefully and rubs the elfling’s shoulder in comfort.

“I am afraid I do not have enough Sindarin to understand.”

Clearly it is something they are used to as a phrase, and so it takes them a few seconds to translate.

“Of three kinds.” says Eluréd eventually, looking to his brother for assurance that that is correct. “Elleth and maia and man.”

Above their heads, Heseld mouths _Beren_ to her brother with a look of stunned realisation that he has to restrain himself from wearing too. _The descendants of Lúthien._ To Trewern, she and Beren have always seemed as figures of distant legend, although, now that he gives it thought, even by the reckoning of men they might be the grandparents of children the twins’ age. Still, he would not have guessed it on his own. Eluréd and Elurín have an ethereal beauty to them, yes, but no more than any elf, not to Trewern’s eyes.

The problem is that Haleth’s treaty with Melian and Thingol had always had a clause requiring a considerable distance to be maintained between their two peoples, for the protection of both. Even Trewern, considered a distant-minded thinker by his family, can make no better distinction between the different houses of the elves than high, dark, and grey. He knows no more of their neighbours in the forest except a few words of their language to trade with, and that they belong to the latter people.

And so, unwilling to press two hurt children for information, they can make no connection between Eluréd, Elurín, and Doriath. It is for the best. Heseld binds their wounds as though they were human boys, and finally judges it safe for both of them to sleep under Trewern’s watch, as he wonders absently if their descent makes them some kind of royalty. And they feel safe enough, and tired enough, that neither of them dream.

In the end, they receive the news of the fall of Doriath from a lone hunter travelling down from Brithiach, a woman with an adventuring Easterling mother and a Halathrim father. It is Harthek out in the woods, since Trewern has a new responsibility - “You are a father now!”, Tressa had teased, only half-joking, when he reached for his bow without thinking first of his two new silver-haired shadows - but without knowing it, he mirrors his brother-by-law, drawing further back into the trees when he first notices her. Likely he would have remained hidden and waited for her to pass through, if he hadn’t noticed a set of pelts just the size of a certain set of twins slung over her back. Perhaps a little too large for them, but eventually they will grow, he reasons. Probably. Presumably. But come winter they will appreciate the warmth of fur no matter its size, especially given that the thin clothes they wear now are ripped.

(Harthek is no Trewern, hiding rabbit kits beneath his tunic every other week; he is still soft, though, as Heseld makes sure to remind him. Merely better at disguising it.)

“Bjame,” he calls softly, stepping out into the rough natural path that she walks on. They have had dealings with her before, and there should be no reason for her to treat any member of his family with suspicion. He knows her well enough to great her by name, after all.

Which is why he has to rear back suddenly when she whirls violently around, long daggers bared and danger in her stance. Harthek has to consciously check the instinct to reach for his sword in response, and instead raises his empty hands in the universal gesture for _I am no threat_ , and raises his eyebrows too in the universal gesture for _what the hell?_

Though her expression is still wary, she lowers her blades.

“Do you not remember me?” he asks.

Bjame does not come closer.

“Friend has turned on friend,” she tells him. “I remember you. But I can’t know whether to trust you.”

“Well, if you will not trust me, will you sell to me?”

That much, she is happy to do, and seems somewhat relaxed by the way that he continues to keep his distance as she cuts the pelts free of her pack.

“You know what has happened, then?” he asks, handing her the meat that he is using to pay. Bjame nods, and seems sorrowful, and he wonders if she was close to any of the slain elves, if she would be able to identify Eluréd and Elurín. “What was it?”

She frowns at him, annoyed.

“Are you testing me?”

“No. I was asking. I know nothing but that there was a battle, nothing of who won, or who even fought.”

“Oh.” Bjame seems quite genuinely stumped, and he considers dropping the subject, if only in an attempt to maintain his family’s relationship with her. But she is only lost for words. “It is… not a simple tale.”

“Can I not hear even its outline?”

And so she sketches the shape of a tragedy for him; the upkeep of magical wards abandoned at precisely the wrong time, a son who loved a father’s heirloom too much, an army driven by an oath, and on her tongue the name of the elf-prince who once led an alliance against Morgoth is a curse. He bows in thanks, and both part ways with heavy hearts.

Harthek is not one to make the same mistake twice. He waits until Eluréd and Elurín are asleep to relate what he has been told to Trewern and the rest of the family, and watches as the blood drains from his brother-by-law’s face, he who is soft enough to take in elflings from the wood, and who has forgiven even poor mad Húrin and furious Túrin, who is appalled at even the thought of such a battle. Tressa is the one to speak, one hand squeezing the hand of her wife, and the other, again, pressed to her pregnant belly.

“It is these sons of Fëanor that they fear, then?”

“Aye.”

“Then it is the sons of Fëanor that we will guard them from.”

“Aye,” agrees Trewern, with an uncommonly grim face and a hard swallow. “By making sure that they are well-hidden.”

There are words, unspoken, but clearly visible in the wide whites of his eyes. _There are not twenty people here, and none of us trained warriors. We cannot hold back an elven army._

“Bjame has been made wary by this kin-strife,” says Harthek, rubbing his beard in consideration. “Who would suspect us of anything if we were to withdraw into ourselves, too?”

It will be harder, perhaps, but they are already braced for the worst, and they are fully capable of subsisting on their own. Harthek watches the others make that same calculation, and adds in his mind that they have yet, in months, to be discovered by any living person other than two children running aimlessly through the woods, that their lands are thought abandoned, and furthermore, though he and his family had never seen any truth in such gossip, many men think of the Drúedain that Heseld’s family are descended from as inferior, more distant than most from the Eldar. The chance that anyone would guess they are involving themselves with the affairs of elves is minimal, and the chance that anyone will ever discover the elflings even smaller yet.

“And perhaps they will grow, and protect us too.” suggests Kenwyn, one of Heseld’s many cousins; she and her siblings give him the same look of reproach all at once.

“They are not guard dog puppies.” she snaps, “Nor faeries or sprites to be appeased for luck.”

“Perhaps they will be of the sort to sit up in the branches singing like birds for years at a time.” agrees Trewern, with a defensive glare at Kenwyn. “They still deserve to have the chance to do so.”

Heseld suspects that the twins, neither of whom have shown any indication of ceasing their clinging to Trewern in the week since he found them, will want to follow him and the other hunters, but, well, now is hardly the time to mention that.

Kenwyn doesn’t look very much like he agrees, but wisely enough, he keeps his tongue behind his teeth. And if anybody else has any objections, then they have the grace at least not to voice it within earshot of the twins.

 

*

 

Tressa’s daughter is born amongst flowers, come ahead of her time along with the strange, early spring. Trewern wonders, privately, as he crouches to inspect unseasonable and defiant daffodils, if it is somehow the elflings’ doing, this burst of warmth and light. He dismisses the thought as ludicrous at first - they are very strange children, but only children nonetheless, who have to be guided through the basics of foraging and cooking and reading - until he sees Elurín hum a crocus into opening, sees snowdrops springing up where Eluréd dances. Neither he nor any of the others can bring themselves to be alarmed by them, though, not in remembrance and awe of the tales of Lúthien Tinúviel, nor when their whistling conversations with curious robins warn the camp ahead of time that travellers come west across the Iant Iaur are near. And when her wife, tearful with relief, tells the others in the camp that Elurín’s clear young voice is what coaxed the persistent blue from the skin of Tressa’s newborn baby, then they become more inclined as a family to ignore such things as juvenile squirrels being roused from their winter dreys to chat with.

They name her Kerra, and, lonely and curious without any other children, the twins are her constant companions. Eluréd is shocked when Tressa tells him that it will take the baby years to learn to speak and walk; much to the amusement of her mothers, Kerra becomes used very quickly to being half-carried about by her strange ‘cousins’, spoken to in full sentences. They have _always_ been able to dance and sing, insist the twins, and their baby sister had _always_ too - though of course they must be exaggerating. Still, though: the baby grows in a way that they simply do not, and by the time she is four and old enough to play as they wish to play, Eluréd and Elurín do not seem at a glance to have changed at all. Perhaps a little taller, Trewern judges, squinting, and perhaps a little leaner (there is barely a surplus of food in the summers, and the winters are hungry in a way two elf-princes cannot have been accustomed to before). But he would still hazard a guess that they were six or seven years old if he knew no better. Kerra surpasses them by the time that she is ten. She sprouts up like a weed, in fact, untouched by any of the childhood weakness or sickness that her mothers had feared in such an early-born babe. Perhaps the way the Eluréd used to sing to her in her cradle as she slept, one long, elven finger carefully stroking downy hair, has something to do with that. Or perhaps Kerra is merely lucky.

They thank the Valar, and do not question what is good.

The hunters, Trewern and Harthek among them, see elves in the woods only a handful of times each, in those years, and their hearts all but stop each time. All those alien figures that had once seemed so elegant and benevolent are potential threats now to their fosterlings: a tall ellon with long dark braids that glimmer in torchlight as he inclines his head in greeting and turns away; a bewildered and dirtied elleth with a gaunt face and ragged clothes, a lost thrall of Morgoth, who stumbles past them with no indication that she sees them at all; a silhouette with a spear in the distance that stalks too gracefully to be a human; disinterested eyes that flash like a wildcat’s in the shadows. None of them wear the red cloaks or the frenzied expressions that haunt the twins’ nightmares. But then, none of them see anything but a human hunter alone. They are not searching any longer. They do not know.

Though the family has to move camp many times, in those years, and sometimes just in time, they are never found. Eventually, the twins do grow; nothing so undignified as human teenage for them, and no hair sprouts on their chin, but their twenties are spent tripping over their suddenly too-long legs and roaming further afield alone than they have before. They are very tall, and silver-haired, and leaf-eared. But they are dressed in rough tunics that they must help to spin themselves, furs and leather, and when Trewern looks at them he cannot help but think that _half-elven_ is a very poor term indeed: they are _half_ of nothing, each with a foot in _both_ worlds, firmly inhabiting the grey area between. Certainly over time they seem more Mannish. When Kerra’s mothers crop her hair to just below her ears they demand that Trewern cut theirs the same way, and he has to blink away his shock at their easy disregard of what, even to the outsider, is a clear Elvish taboo against short hair. Still unnaturally light, they fill out a little with muscle. By thirty they might be mistaken for men - at a distance, only, true, but it would be possible.

By the time the twins are thirty Trewern is in his fifties, and more has changed than he can say. The darkness creeps further and further into Brethil; in the distance they hear the unnatural thunder of dragon wings and the howls of wargs and of other monsters to which they can give no name. Some of the family slip away - Heseld’s heart stops beating in her sleep, peaceful and quiet, and the expressions of confusion and the silent tears of the twins are worse in some ways than the sight of a sister happy in death - and Trewern and Harthek and Tressa and the others, observing their grey hair and the lines of their faces in still water, hint at their age and their new aches and fragilities. Kerra understands no better than the boys that most likely they will one day be left alone of these last Haladin in the woods, they three. Trewern is not cruel enough to give voice to his fears that one day then there will remain here only two peredhel, ageless, until the ending of the world by the hands of Morgoth.

But his fears are unfounded. It does not end that way.

 

*

 

Far away, their little sister, who Eluréd and Elurín remember only as bright babbling birdsong and a cloud of dark hair, faces Fëanor’s oath for the second time in her life. She stares defiantly into those frenzied eyes, sees the red cloak of the first-born Fëanorion flying behind him as he reaches for the gem in her hand, and steps backwards from a cliff unafraid rather than let him take it. The Sindar of their birth and the people of Haleth they have adopted fall together too that day, in that place of refuge.

That day, too, the last remaining sons of Fëanor find a pair of six year old peredhel twins terrified and hiding, and none at all of Eluréd and Elurín’s nightmares of this exact scenario are visited on the nephews they do not know. Instead, the second-born Fëanorion’s expression softens with pity and guilt, and he sheaths his bloodsoaked sword so that it will not frighten them. _It is alright_ , he comforts them, voice thick. _You can come out, now. We will not harm you_. And Elrond and Elros are carried away wrapped warmly in his red cloak, and to them it is a sanctuary and not a terror.

Eluréd and Elurín sleep dreamlessly through the bloody night of the Third Kinslaying. They wake well-rested and tease each other over the state of their hair and make breakfast, all as their sister takes the shape of a seagull and soars determinedly west. Eluréd is in the branches of an oak with his hand in a robin’s nest, when their brother-by-law drops to his knees in awe and their sister sheds her avian form to present him with the blinding light of what they had once called _Ada’s jewel._ Scarce weeks later, Elurín is kneeling by a clear brook to refill his waterskin and bother the busy fish, when a lone ship passes somehow into Aman with its captain both mortal and elf, as between worlds as they are. They know of none of this. And they and all their adopted family are lying sprawled around the dying embers of their campfire as their brother-by-law is doomed by the Valar.

It is deep night, in Beleriand, and as a new star rises into the velvet summer sky above them, both Eluréd and Elurín are visited in their dreams.

 

*

 

“Choose.” comes a deep bass, ringing long around their skulls. They shudder, and slowly, lost in the honeycomb-fragmented world of the sleeping mind, look up.

Each twin lays eyes on the terrible face of the doomsman of the Valar, and each meets his gaze with numb and dreamy curiosity - but neither will remember the grim face, when they wake.

Each twin looks around himself, scans a dark columned hall stretching to eternity, glances up at an impossibly distant dome laid with a mosaic of stars. Each twin thinks _where is my brother?_

“You must make this choice alone,” rumbles the doomsman, in his voice like an earthquake, and though he does not speak unkindly, the power of his words, the finality, is such that they tremble and almost fall before him.

“ _Choose_.” Námo orders again, and they are all of sudden choking on the urgency of their desire to obey him.

 _Choose what?_ , each twin gasps, struck between every decision they have ever made.

“Your people.” His voice is neither sympathetic nor demanding. It simply _is_ ; like stone, like a mountain, unchangeable. “Your life. Your death.”

Their _people_ are the mortal woodsmen who saved them. They do not say this out loud, but a blur of memories and alarm swirls around their fëa.

“Are you mortal, or are you elf?”

There is the same finality. But they stand above it, in this. They have an answer.

 _Both._ says one twin, certain. _No: neither._

 _Neither_ , says the other twin, equally as sure. _Or both_.

“ _Choose_.” comes the command again - and they understand, without having to be told, that they are in the halls of the dead, as each feels himself pulled asunder between the two dark ends of the chamber, between a fragile cold of preservation and a stale cold of emptiness. “There is no abstaining.”

Neither Eluréd nor Elurín think of the death that waits for them one day, nor even of one another. Each twin trusts in his brother. They think of their family, and not the family that gave them their silver hair and leaf-sharp ears, but the family that has given them warmth and shelter and love, when the former was robbed of the opportunity to do so.

They have two sisters, and both are brave and bright, but they do not know the elf maid unafraid of the sea. They know the human girl unafraid of the woods.

 _Men_ , breath each of them, separately, and together. _I am a man. We are men._

“May Eru witness it.”

 

*

 

In the near future, Beleriand will sink piece by piece below the angry waves. Its hills and its forests and its settlements will drown along with its orcs and monsters.

Eluréd, Elurín, and all those who knew the truth of their disappearance will be dead when the ocean swallows them. Not so very long dead, true, but dead nonetheless, each twin lying curled in the roots of a tree they love and wish to nourish rather than in graves they will not have the strength to dig. They will be visibly old, faces lined and bearded, and with their long ears covered by their hair, its natural silver faded to a shining white, no one would for a moment think them anything other than men.

Men are all they are, after all. The elf-princes they once were are almost forgotten. They will be little more than a footnote in the histories of those that survive the Drowning of Beleriand, mere unfortunate casualties of a bloody war, two tiny figures barely visible in only a handful of memories.

 _It is presumed that they died alone in the forest of Brethil,_ guess the chroniclers who bother to so much as guess.

They are not wrong. But there too exists a far longer tale, lost to time and water though it may be.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was partially inspired by a line in an archeology textbook reading “No human activity has been discovered in this area in the late Palaeolithic era, apart from a few small unremarkable settlements of six decades or less.” It struck me that some Stone Age people might have lived their entire lives in those lonely settlements, and been completely unknown to those around them as well as to historians.
> 
> The Haladin have Cornish names, sometimes with changed consonants at the beginnings of the words, since Tolkien used that method to name some of his human characters. "Bjame" is a Norse name with a changed ending, which usually works for the Easterlings.


End file.
